CB: The Federal Transit Administration has given Honolulu’s troubled rail project until the end of April to submit a plan for how it plans to bridge a shortfall likely to approach $2 billion.

In a letter dated Tuesday, the FTA denied the city of Honolulu’s request to extend the deadline for the so-called recovery plan until the end of June. At the same time, the FTA did not hold the city to the original deadline of the end of this month, which would have been difficult to meet….

The interim plan submitted in September included two broad alternatives. One would involve raising the money to complete the project to the Ala Moana Center. The second would defer some stations and other elements of the project, but not pare it back so much that the federal government would withdraw its support of $1.55 billion.

In the FTA letter, regional administrator Leslie Rogers acknowledges the city’s desire to find enough money to build the project as first envisioned, but urges officials to continue to work of the “Plan B” for a scaled-back system that would end at a Downtown Station. This would involve a detailed cost and schedule analysis and ridership studies, and looking at ways to save money.

The city should hold off on any actions that would limit its options, Rogers wrote.

“We appreciate the many challenges HART has faced in the design and construction of the Project,” he wrote. He pointed to recent progress, such as the hiring of an interim director, Krishniah Murthy, and arranging for a peer review of the project by industry experts….

HTH: Mayor Harry Kim’s dream of making Mauna Kea a park didn’t come as a surprise to one telescope director, who said he shares Kim’s underlying philosophy.

Doug Simons, executive director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop the mountain, said he sees Kim as trying to get people to think outside the box and end what the astronomer calls entrenchment of competing interests.

“It’s not trying to rewrite potential uses for the mountain,” said Simons, who also sits on the Office of Mauna Kea Management board. “I think what he is after is for people to look at the situation at a fundamentally different way … and putting aside a winner versus loser mentality.”

He said the mayor previously had spoken to him about the idea, which Kim mentioned publicly at his inauguration Monday….

Kealoha Pisciotta, a TMT opponent, said Kim has not talked to their side about his idea, and she is disappointed that he continues to support the giant telescope project, which is going through a second contested case hearing.

“I’m a little disappointed that he came out in support of something that is still in the legal process,” Pisciotta said.

She said calling it a “park” also doesn’t reflect the views of those Hawaiians who see it as a religious site.

“It’s nice for people to suggest Mauna Kea should be a park, but it is our church,” Pisciotta said, adding that she supports recreational and hunting activity on the mountain.

Kim didn’t return a call to his office Tuesday by deadline, but Scott Ishikawa, a spokesman for TMT International Observatory, confirmed that TMT Chairman Henry Yang met with the mayor that morning.

Ishikawa said the meeting lasted 10 to 15 minutes and was meant to congratulate Kim on his election. Ishikawa said the park idea came up, but he had no additional comment….

The two councils argued that Department of Education leadership should remain consistent through the implementation of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which will replace No Child Left Behind beginning with the 2017-2018 school year.

Also in written testimony, Dawn Kau’i Sang, director of the Office of Hawaiian Education, urged the board to reconsider its decision to replace Matayoshi. Sang asked that her contract be extended, but did not specify how long….

KHON: …A sewage spill in Ko Olina has turned out to be much worse than what the city originally estimated.

It happened last week Wednesday, Nov. 30, near the golf course. The city said a 16-inch main broke and more than a thousand gallons of sewage spilled in the undeveloped area.

We pressed the city on Tuesday, Dec. 5, after we spotted work crews back at the site spraying it with chemicals for several hours. We’ve since learned that the spill was considerably more than a thousand gallons. A spokesman told us late Tuesday afternoon that more than 200,000 gallons of sewage spilled from that pipe.

We reached the site at around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday and city workers were already spraying the area with a hose that was connected to large truck. For hours, they kept spraying as they slowly went down the dirt road for about a half-mile that led to the Ko Olina sewage pumping station.

Sources tell us it’s unusual for city workers to come back to the site nearly a week after it happened, but they were forced to to do it because guests and residents in the area were complaining about the smell.

A similar incident occurred in the same area in April…. The city said a thousand gallons spilled from that incident also….

IM: The Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) will take up matters on Friday with regard to the proposed second wind generation facility in rural Kahuku.

First the Land Board will decide whether to grant a contested case proceeding. If that is voted down, then the Land Board will consider approving the land lease.

BLNR meetings are held in the DLNR Board Room 132 on the first floor of the Kalanimoku Building at 1151 Punchbowl St. The Board Room is located on the makai (ocean) side of the building. The BLNR agenda and the staff submittals are posted.

The petition for a contested case hearing was filed by State Senator Gil Riviere on behalf of Keep the North Shore Country (KNSC). The petition seeks to challenge the Incidental Take License (ITL) and the Final Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for the Na Pua Makani facility.

IM: Hawai`i Governor David Ige has the opportunity to shape energy policy by making key appointments to fill open energy positions at the Hawai`i Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism (DBEDT), and the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA).

The Hawai`i Public Utilities Commission is a three-member body. Commissioner Mike Champley was replaced with Thomas Gorak last summer. Prior to being named an interim Commissioner, Gorak had planned to retire in December. Governor Ige must submit someone`s name to the 2017 State Senate, to fill the Commission term, which lasts until 2022. This could be Gorak or someone else.

The Executive Director of the DCCA Division of Consumer Advocacy (Consumer Advocate) is open and available since Jeff Ono left at the end of August. The Consumer Advocate represents the general public in all matters before the Hawai`i Public Utilities Commission.

Mark Glick, the Director of the DBEDT State Energy Office, is leaving his current post next week to work at the Hawai`i Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) at the University of Hawai`, Mānoa….

HTH: One day after former Mayor Billy Kenoi left office, the county Board of Ethics (larded with Kenoi cronies) on Tuesday closed the book on his admitted misuse of his county-issued purchasing card by unanimously approving an advisory opinion acknowledging his admission and his promise that it won’t happen again….

his attorney, Richard Sing, put this statement on the record in a stipulation to the board at a Nov. 10 meeting, according to meeting minutes released Tuesday: “We would propose that the respondent would agree and stipulate that the county of Hawaii purchasing card procedures were violated and that it won’t happen again.” (Duh. Since he is no longer in office. LOL!)

(Translation: We ran down the clock. And now the clock has run down.)

The advisory opinion does contain the language that the board found the former mayor’s action violated the section of the ethics code prohibiting “using county property or personnel for other than a public activity or purpose.“

HNN: The head of the state Public Safety Department has acknowledged he was speeding on July 27, when an officer pulled him over in his pick-up on the Pali Highway.

Director Nolan Espinda was clocked going 68 mph in a 35 mph zone….

Espinda was just over the threshold for excessive speeding and could have been arrested.

He wasn't, but he insists he did not get any preferential treatment.

Excessive speeding means the driver was going more than 30 miles an hour over the posted limit. An excessive speeding case is turned from a civil case to a criminal one.

As head of the Department of Public Safety, Espinda is in charge of the sheriff's department and the jails. He said he never told the officer who he was and never asked the courts for any leeway because of his position.

"I made my court appearance as required," Espinda said, adding he entered into a plea deal and in exchange the prosecutor dropped the extra miles, putting the case just under the excessive speeding requirement. …

CB: …Hawaiians historically have been color-blind and have freely intermarried since the first immigrants from Europe and Asia arrived. These intermarriages, which burst through the single-identity ceiling, spawned the term hapa-haole. The word haole does not mean white, it means foreign. So whole new generations of hapa families evolved in an incredible merging of DNA. Hawaiian-Chinese, Hawaiian-Portuguese, Hawaiian-German, and so forth.

Hapa-haole family names like Apo, Silva, Wilhelm, Aki, Freitas, Akau, Burgess, Campbell, McCandless, Morgan, Bishop, Trask, Badayos, Cachola, Benham, Thompson, Guererro and hundreds of families of mixed ancestry with the common denominator of Hawaiian ancestry emerged. I don’t know why, but many of these families who gave a nod to their common Hawaiian ancestry for census purposes did not actually speak to what their dominant socio-cultural-political lifestyle might be. So, the application of a single identity to Hawaiians as having a uniformly predictable set of traits, behaviors, and belief systems belies the truth that the Hawaiian community is far more diverse than uniform.

Hawaiians are a potpourri of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, tolerant, intolerant, business leaders, social workers, community leaders, farmers, soldiers, scholars, environmentalists, medical workers, poets, artists, scientists and more in pursuit of every human endeavor.

There is one angle to the single-identity construct that I hope will prevail in this changing world in referencing all the people of Hawaii. I believe we can still say uniformly that we are the people of aloha. We must always maintain our aloha for each other….